Isabelle Lehn
Isabelle Lehn was born in Bonn, Germany, in 1979. She studied rhetoric, pedagogy and cultural anthropology in Tübingen, where she earned a doctorate in philosophy. As a postdoc, she studied creative writing at the German Institute of Literature in Leipzig (Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig), where she later worked as a lecturer and is currently researching historic creative writing programs in the GDR. She published in anthologies and magazines and received a number of prizes, including in the 2014 Prosanova short-story competition, for her stories, essays, screenplays, and radio plays. “
Works I Have So Far Read for German Literature Month, November, 2017
- “You’d Have Larvae Too” by Nora Wagener, 2016
- Vertigo by W. G. Sebald, 2009
- The Last Weynfeldt by Martin Suter, 2006
- “An Earthquake in Chile” by Heinrich Von Kleist, 1809
- Who is Martha? by Marjana Gaponenko, 2012
- “The Legal Haziness of Marriage” by Olga Grjasnowa, 2015
- “Aladdin, COB” by Isabelle Lehn, 2015
We have, among others, two objectives for this year’s German Literature Month, to read a few 21st century works and and more works by women than I have in past years.
The July, 2015 issue of Words Without Borders, readable online, is devoted to Emerging German Writers. The issue contains seven translated stories, I plan to post upon two of them, both of which you can read online at the link at the close of this post.
“Aladdin, COB” by Isabelle Lehn, this morning’s story, deals with the production of a film about the battle with Isis. The precise geographic location is left vague, we are not quite sure who is behind the film. It seems it may be Americans as at one point the narrator, a man who works at a cafe and is in the film, says, “they normally give those parts to men from Afghanistan”. We are just thrown into the middle of things without a big explanation.
Live is often like that.
I enjoyed this story, I’m hoping to read more of the author’s work.
You can read this story and six more, as well as some poems and an introduction at the webpage of Words Without Borders
You can learn more about German Literature Month on their link page
Avant Bousweau
What a surprising turn this story took! Also, I love the final image at the end. It ties us back to earlier parts of the story, but with that peek at a new feeling too.
ReplyDeleteI am so glad you commented on my post. Your blog is a treasure-chest. I look forward to reading more German Lit this month. Thank you! :)
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